


haircut & post office

by owlinaminor



Category: A Wrinkle in Time (2018), Austin & Murry-O'Keefe Families - Madeleine L'Engle, Kairos (O'Keefe) Series - Madeleine L'Engle
Genre: Epilogue, Established Relationship, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-27
Updated: 2017-12-27
Packaged: 2019-02-22 10:31:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,374
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13165077
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/owlinaminor/pseuds/owlinaminor
Summary: Dr. Murry does not like to consider herself a petty person.  But she thinks that, if necessary, she could survive another two years off the look on Mrs. Mulligan’s face when she strolls into the post office, her clean-shaven, newly bespectacled, and brightly grinning husband in tow.The epilogue that the better Dr. Murry deserves.





	haircut & post office

**Author's Note:**

> i reread all of _a wrinkle in time_ today, and it left me with a lot of feelings about meg's mother and about four hours remaining in my family's car trip. naturally, this resulted.
> 
> dedicated to [the nice disney exec who confirmed that mrs. murry will still be a scientist in the movie](https://twitter.com/owlinaminor/status/945736177331695616).
> 
>  **edit, 3/15/18:** added the fandom tag for the movie, because although i wrote this a couple months before it came out, i think its portrayals of kate and alex murry are pretty similar to mine and the fic could fit in either universe.

>  The shadows were swirling in the crystal again, and as they cleared Meg began to recognize her mother's lab at home.  Mrs. Murry was sitting perched on her high school, writing away at a sheet of paper on a clipboard on her lap.  She's writing Father, Meg thought.  The way she always does.  Every night. –  _A Wrinkle in Time, p. 96_
> 
>  
> 
> "I'm very proud of you, my daughter."  Mr. Murry kissed her gravely, then turned toward the house.  "Now I must go in to Mother."  Meg could tell that he was trying to control his anxiety and eagerness. –  _A Wrinkle in Time, p. 209_

 

His hair is longer.

Longer, shaggier, and streaked with gray, as though he’s a hermit, or an adventurer returning from circumnavigating the globe.  It’s not a bad look for him, she thinks – she could even be persuaded to call it ruggedly handsome.  He’ll need to trim it soon, though.  The neighbors will talk.

And then she can’t believe she’s thinking about _neighbors_ and _hair length_ when her _husband_ is here before her, racing through her sons’ vegetable garden, skinnier and more wrinkled and vaguely resembling a hermit but _here._

“Father!” Sandy yells.

And she’s racing too, legs pulled forward almost without her neurons having to make the connection, pulled by gravity and the magnetism of the earth.  She runs until he collides with her, two particles at critical velocity grinning and laughing – he’s lost his glasses but he knows her face by touch, has ever since her third year of grad school when they snuck onto the roof of the chemistry building one summer night and he tried to convince her there was a constellation shaped like a giraffe –

She presses her forehead to his.  Time – the last two years and change, the long nights without sleep and the aches in the small of her back and the endless questions – it all narrows to a point and pushes to the back of her mind.  Meaningless in the face of this rough familiar texture of his skin, these hands rising to cradle her face, _this_ scent of cold air and rust and beneath it unequivocally him, _this –_

Meg comes barreling into her, and then Charles Wallace, and then Sandy and Dennys and Calvin are pulled into the circle.  The universe could come to a screeching halt, out there beyond the moon, and she would never notice.  Her world is all here, in this circle of smiling faces and this vegetable garden and those bacteria colonies growing in the house beyond.  Her world is the globes of his eyes, more brilliant than the stars twinkling in the twilight above.

* * *

After the children have gone to bed – after Charles Wallace has insisted his father read a story and pulled _The Odyssey_ off the living room shelves, after the children have all gathered on the couch like a living pyramid and she has watched from the kitchen, putting away the dinner dishes, her heart threatening to burst, and after she has pulled out the caviar they’d all been saving for her birthday, and after Charles Wallace has fallen asleep on his father’s knee and the twins have arm-wrestled over who’d get to carry him to bed, and after Meg has sent Calvin home with a blush and a kiss to the cheek and a promise to talk to him at school the next day, after the house at last has fallen to the crickets and distant owls – she takes him to the lab and asks him to tell her everything.

“I know it’s classified,” she says, hands clenched into fists at her sides, toes tingling in her thick wool socks, “but I am your wife and I deserve –”

“Yes,” he replies.  “Yes.  Of course.  Yes.”  He runs a hand through his too-long hair, and she reaches out her own.  She’s spent two years not touching him.  She can be allowed a few hours of inseparability.

And so they sit together on her lab stool, her back against his chest, and he tells her everything.  The tesseract, and the cruel planet shrouded in darkness, and the hive mind he resisted, and the lengths to which his children had to go to save him.  She is shocked at all the right moments, and angry at perhaps more than the right moments, twisting in his arms to demand, _how could you leave Charles Wallace, how could you leave my baby._

His expression at that is so fragile, a glass beaker shattered on the cement floor, that she’s almost afraid he’ll tip backwards off the lab stool, and she quiets to let him finish.

He tells her what Meg said before going back on her own, that, _Mother was always shoving her out into the world,_ and she can’t help a laugh.  “Not the kind of challenging herself I had in mind,” she says, and he smiles back at her, this quiet, soft thing, and she has missed him _so much_ it’s a wound in her side stitching itself back together, the answer to a question she’s been asking for years finally appearing green and brilliant in the lens of her microscope.

“But how do you think the brain works?” she asks him.  “The IT?  What’s powering it?  How does it control all the people on the planet?  And how does that planet, in a whole different galaxy from ours, have the same human life forms as ours?  What was its process of evolution, of geological formation?”

“Can you…”  He looks at her, and looks at her, and she starts to wonder if he’s fallen asleep sitting up.  But then he goes on, “write down your questions for tomorrow?”

She twists on the stool until she’s facing him, her legs slung forward around his hips, and leans in to press a kiss against his cheek.  His beard is thick and bristly.  And then she stands on the metal rung beneath the stool, reaches into the cabinet for a fresh pad of paper and a blue pen.  He reaches a hand up to her waist to steady her and keeps it there as she sits back down, solidly in his lap now, and she leans against the counter to scribble out as many questions as she can think of.

She ends it with one that is not theoretical, merely observational, and echoes it aloud.

“How did you resist it for so long?  You said Meg was weak to it the first time, and Calvin wouldn’t last much longer, so how did you hold out against it?”

“The Periodic Table,” he says.  “Equations.  As many as I could remember or derive without a chalkboard.  Math problems.  Logic problems.  And then, when all that failed, you.”

“Me?”  She shifts forward slightly, reaches up to cup her hands around his face.  His hair falls to brush her fingertips, feather-light, as he nods.

Then he continues, his eyes never leaving hers.  “I replayed conversations we had, imagined conversations we could have had.  I invented versions of what I would tell you if I ever got home.  But that tactic began to fail, because I got scared… I didn’t know how much time had passed, if it had been a month or a year or a decade.  If I would return to find you an old woman, our children all grown into strangers.  Or if I would return to find you had moved on…”

His hands on her waist are tighter now, fingers digging into her skin as though he wishes he could take all her pain and loneliness and pull it into himself, carry it for her.  She leans in for a moment, touches her forehead to his, and then she pushes back and stands up, toes on the bar beneath the stool then toes on the floor beneath.  She pads across the lab, opens the drawer where she keeps the rulers and the scissors and the dissecting knives.  And a small stash of letters, neatly sealed in manila envelopes and addressed to Washington.

She hands them to him.

His eyes go wide – blue expanding to two small galaxies.

“You wrote to me,” he says, his voice hoarse.

She meets his gaze.  “Every day.”

And then he’s jumping off the stool, letting it clatter to the floor – and she’s not thinking about waking the children or unstable conditions for her cultures, she’s just kissing him, kissing him, holding on as though she’ll never need to breathe again.

* * *

He stops halfway to unbuttoning her shirt.

She releases the last three buttons and pushes it off her shoulders, tosses it to the side of the bed and is about to start on her bra when she catches the look in his eyes, glittering in the moonlight.

“What?” she asks.  She shouldn’t be this impatient but, well.  It’s been _two years._

He drops his hands to his sides, then folds them behind his back.  On his knees on top of their bed, his tie undone and pants getting there, too-long hair swept back by unsteady hands, he looks faintly ridiculous.  But she echoes his posture for a moment, waiting.

“I just wanted to let you know,” he says, haltingly, “that I have not slept properly in a very long time.  Perhaps two years.  I can’t say for sure.  So if I fall asleep during this, please know that it is neither a reflection of your beauty, nor of your skills, nor of my attraction to you, which is growing exponentially by the second –”

He probably has more, but she doesn’t hear it, collapsing as she is in a fit of laughter.  Silent laughter, mostly, because Charles Wallace is asleep (or should be asleep, at least) in the next room, but the odd snort does manage to escape.

“What?”  His brow furrows in an expression of offense that she knows is at least seventy percent false.  “I thought it only polite of me to give you a warning –”

“First of all,” she says, “I love you.  I don’t think I’ve told you that yet tonight, and now seems as good a time as any.  Second of all, that wasn’t a warning.  That was a challenge.”

* * *

She takes the next day off.

Well, as much as she can.  She still slips out of bed around seven in the morning (half an hour later than usual, thanks to the warm circle of his arms and the pattern of sunlight on his back) to fix the children breakfast and packed lunches, sending Meg an extra sandwich for Calvin because he’ll certainly need it if the way he put away stew last night was any indication.  She still spends an hour in the lab uprighting the stool, doing counts of all her cultures, checking that the growth chambers are at the correct temperatures, cleaning a couple tubes of paramecium.  And she still tutors Charles Wallace on a chapter of Mendel, helps him water his tomato plants, gives him a new puzzle to work on through the afternoon.

But after all that, she shucks off her shoes and climbs back into bed, with a fresh cup of coffee and an old copy of _Nature_ she quickly abandons in favor of tracing the planes of her husband’s back, mapping coordinates of their house, their land, their life. 

He finally blinks awake some time past three in the afternoon, returning to consciousness slowly and then all at once as he catches sight of her.  He gasps her name, one hand sweeping behind him in search of lost glasses.  She catches his wrist in her fingers, draws his hand up to her face.

“You’re home,” she tells him, strict as though she’s lecturing undergrads again.  “You’re safe.  I’m here.  I’m not going anywhere.”

He drops his forehead to her shoulder and stays, stays, his breathing slowing to the pace of her heartbeat.

It is a long time before they go downstairs.

But go downstairs they must, eventually.  She nearly burns some toast, smears it with butter and what’s left of the caviar, and he puts in a long-distance phone call.

“They want me down there right away,” he says, after she hears, “It’s me.” and a short version of the story he told her last night.  She frowns, shakes her head.  “Tomorrow?” he asks.  She shakes her head again.

Finally, he sighs and passes her the phone.

“My husband has just spent two years in another universe, enduring indescribable torture by a being of indescribable darkness, all in the name of his research for you,” she tells the official at the other end of the line.  “You owe him at _least_ one week to rest and spend time with his family.  I can personally ensure that he will not tesser to any distant planets during that time.”

“Yes, Mrs. Murry,” the voice at the other end intones.

“ _Dr._ Murry,” she corrects it.  She waits for an abridged echo, then hangs up to find her husband staring at her with a look somewhere between the one he’d given her when she explained the research behind her first primary-author paper, and the one he’d given her when he saw the letters last night.

“Really, they should give you a month,” she tells him.  “But I know where to not ask for too much.”

“You can never ask for too much,” he replies, serious as the sun.  “Not from me.”

“Really?”  She steps closer, into the space of his knees, spread at a right angle out from where he’s sitting in a chair _(his chair)_ at the kitchen table.

His hands come up to grip her waist, his eyes gazing up blue enough for a universe’s supply of hurricanes.

“Anything,” he says.  “Just name it.”

“A haircut,” she tells him.  “And a trip to the post office.”

“Not what I was expecting to hear,” he says, “but okay.”

And she laughs against his shoulder, laughs until she’s breathless, until with one good jump she could float ten feet above the ground.

* * *

Dr. Murry does not like to consider herself a petty person.  But she thinks that, if necessary, she could survive another two years off the look on Mrs. Mulligan’s face when she strolls into the post office, her clean-shaven, newly bespectacled, and brightly grinning husband in tow.

**Author's Note:**

> talk to me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/owlinaminor) and/or [tumblr](http://owlinaminor.tumblr.com/)! don't cook stew in your labs! i love you!


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